What in the world am I thinking!? I am NOT an animal person, and I just spent the better part of the morning wrestling with two baby goats that we brought home last night. Goats are strong, by the way. And stinky.

Why do I have two goats in a cage? That’s a good question. Let me begin by sharing how we acquired our other animals.

The day we got our dog, we were not even considering a puppy. I took the kids to the pet store just to look at the animals. Then I saw her. She was sitting in that pitiful little pen. Just sitting there looking at me with those big sad eyes. Begging to be rescued. Then I noticed the sign on her pen – CLEARANCE. I knew I had to have her. So I paid the slashed price and asked the shopkeeper to hold her while I ran to Wal-Mart to buy the things normal people purchase in preparation for a puppy. And to call my husband to inform him of the new addition to our family.

Who could resist those eyes?

I was guilted into our next pet acquisition. Kendra really played me on this one. How could I not buy her the little kitty when her brother had a puppy. After all, she had always dreamed of having a kitten for her whole entire life. So, we bought the kitten and then went back to Wal-Mart for kitten stuff.

Sparkles the kitten.

The dog and cat were enough for a long while. Until one day, the kids really decided they absolutely couldn’t live without pet rabbits. So, we bought them. They had to live in a dog kennel in the garage for a few days while Ronnie built them a hutch. Why? Because, once again, we were unprepared.

Pleeease, Mom and Dad, pleeeease!?

Well, after that, we tried fish, but that didn’t work so well as you remember if you read my post To Flush or Not to Flush. Moving on.

Time went on. We went through several rabbits, and my sister added a dog to the mix, but we pretty much stayed the same for a few months. Then, my son started really taking interest in frogs. Since I’ve always been very determined not to pass my irrational fear on to my kids, I helped him build a habitat in the unused fish aquarium, and we put four frogs he captured in it. I have to concentrate on not letting it bother me that there are frogs in his bedroom. I don’t go in there much.

Then, Ronnie decided to get chickens. Fresh eggs, teaching responsibility, all that good stuff. I went along with it because the baby chicks were so cute. However, since we were – you guessed it – unprepared! – the chickens lived in a container in my kitchen too long for me to end up liking them. And, honestly, now that they’re older, they scare me to death. They’re like frogs with feathers. And beaks and long claws. Terrifying.

So, that brings me to the goats. We knew we were going to buy them, so we bought all the supplies to build a fence for them. We even started on it. Good, huh? Unfortunately, that’s all we did, so when we went to get the goats last night, we brought them home and had nowhere to put them. Typical of us, really.

I was supposed to put collars on them this morning, and tie them to something so they could be out for the day until we finish the fence tomorrow. Good plan, huh? Well, it was a failure. Goats don’t like collars. Goats don’t like being led on a leash. Goats make a lot of racket, poop all the time, and jump around like bucking broncos. Who knew they’d be kind of like little donkeys? Not me, that’s for sure.

So, Max and I managed to get them to the backyard, but the collars I bought were too big, and everything that could go wrong went wrong, and they probably hate me already, and they’re only 106 days old and now they’re probably traumatized, and I’m afraid they’re going to bite me, and the dogs are barking at them like crazy, and the goats are bleeting at the top of their little lungs, and I have goat pee and poop and hair all over me, and I’m not really sure how I feel about goats now.

We’ll build the fence tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’ve heard a rumor that someone we know has a pot-bellied pig they don’t want any more…

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People have arrived at my blog with several very unusual Google searches. My favorites so far are…

ugly scene kids,

march 10, 2012 mudwrestling,

i will be late to work in the morning,

snot nose babe,

girl building treehouse,

flushed tetra,

i have littered,

redneck activities in ohio,

it’s wednesday wake up and get it together, and

fake campfire.

Some of these baffle me a little bit. What are these people thinking? Some of them I understand a little better than others.

For instance, take “ugly scene kids” – I can imagine a frazzled mom somewhere just home from a particularly bad grocery shopping trip wondering if she’s alone in the world. Surely, there are kids out there as bad as hers. So she Googles it to make herself feel better.

The “march 10, 2012 mudwrestling” is a little weird. Unless somewhere in the world there was a mudwrestling tournament that lasted several days, and some Googler somewhere missed the March 10 match and needed to know the stats. I’m sure that’s what it was.

“I will be late to work in the morning.” Hmmm…did this person really think this was the way to let his employer know? Google doesn’t really work that way. Hope he figured that out and made that all-important phone call.

“Snot nose babe” – weird. Weird if they meant a baby, and even weirder if they meant a babe as in a swimsuit model. I know people can have inexplicable fetishes, but snot – really?

“Redneck activities in ohio” was easy to figure out. Obviously, a redneck from South Carolina was sitting around with his buddies and they were a little bored. Hey, I wonder what activities rednecks participate in in Ohio?

I feel kind of bad for the person who Googled “it’s wednesday wake up and get it together.” I think he could seriously benefit from some motivational CDs, a little less alcohol, and maybe a puppy. Hope that day turned out okay.

In the spirit of self-promotion, I am now going to write some phrases that I’m positive will be searched in the near future by some of the readers who stumbled upon my blog with the aforementioned phrases. I am trying to build my readership, after all. So, here’s to my newfound friends, the unusual Google searchers:

kids worse than mine

mudwrestling championship match

i won’t be at work today because i’m sick

hot actresses caught with slimy boogers hanging from nose

redneck activities in canada (I’m sure those guys have finished the fifty states by now…)

it’s friday stop being such a lazy bum get a life i need a friend or a puppy.

I can’t wait for my Googling friends to see what I’ve done to entice them to my blog. Happy searching!

Oh, and Googling friends, once you do find me again – the surefire way to find this blog again is to follow it!

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The fish tank was fun for, oh, about six months. Then it just got to be downright annoying. Fish kept dying for no apparent reason. We’d buy more, they’d die. Once Max’s favorite guppie Mr. Winnypig died too and we were down to just two fish in the giant aquarium, I decided no more fish tank for us.

I often do things like this when Ronnie isn’t home. I fished the last two survivors out with the net and put them in a bubble vase while I finished draining the water and dismantling their habitat.

When I finally finished, I contemplated what to do with the white tetra and black tetra that were left. I know I should have just flushed them and been done with it, but somehow that just didn’t seem fair. So, I waited for Ronnie to let him do it.

He would not flush those fish. He didn’t want to be the one to kill them, either. We argued about it for weeks. While we continued trying to talk each other into killing the fish, their state of happiness declined rather noticeably.

After all, they were used to a thirty gallon tank with places to go and other fish to see and a nice bubble feature. The vase just wasn’t the same. And since we kept it in the bathroom (close to the commode), it fogged up every time we took a shower and it developed a little film of hair product on the surface of the water.

We both just wanted them to die so we could flush the bodies. How did they keep living!? These two fish really were survivors. Very annoying.

Finally, after my mother accused us of having a concentration camp for fish, I knew I had to “man up” and flush the fish.

Once again, I waited until Ronnie wasn’t home.

I carefully poured the fish into the toilet. The poor white tetra landed on its side and did not even have the energy left to return to an upright position. Clearly, I was doing the mature, responsible, humane, and righteous thing by putting them out of their misery.

I looked at them in my toilet.

And I couldn’t do it.

“Kendra!” I called. “Do you want to flush the fish?”

She looked in the toilet. Looked at me (a little accusingly, if you ask me). Shrugged her shoulders and flushed the fish.